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Sunday, 26 August 2012

Choc-choc-chocolatey Chocolate Cookies with Coconut Oil

Very chocolatey crunchy chocolate cookies with all kinds of chocolate and coconut oil

Since I started baking, I find that I can't eat many store-bought cookies, cakes, brownies or cupcakes anymore. There are only few I can tolerate... the rest just tastes so artificial and full of preservatives. So when a box of uniform-looking chocolate cookies appeared at work, I was suspicious. But - whoa. They tasted SO GOOD. So unlike other store-bought cookies... crunchy, chocolatey (but not too much), not too sweet and a hint of coconut. Delish. In fact, they were so delicious that I only remembered to take a picture when I had already eaten approximately 65% of the cookie. So, apologies for that. This is what they and the package looked like:

Surprisingly extremely tasty chocolate cookies by 'knusperreich'. 'Surprisingly', because they are strictly speaking "store bought" or even "ordered online", which in my experience usually equals artificial taste.*

So I really wanted to try and bake similar cookies - this hint of coconut was just perfect. (BTW: it is entirely possible that I was only imagining the coconutty taste since it didn't say anything about coconut...).

So I thought it'd be a really good idea to take a normal chocolate cookies recipe and simply substitue coconut oil for any butter or oil the recipe might call for. After hunting around quite unsuccessfully for coconut oil in several shops, I finally thought to simply go to an Asia store. And tadaa:

Coconut oil at room temperature.

It was only 3.50 Euro for 500 ml - and apparently, coconut oil is great for basically everything: healthier than vegetable oil, good as a conditioner for shiny hair, great as a base for home-made face scrubs, moisturizing, ... etc! (Check out 122 uses of coconut oil here.) So I was pretty excited about my purchase.

Now, for the baking. A general warning up front: I thought I could just take the amount of butter the recipe calls for and use the same amount of oil ...in weight. Nope. What I should have done, maybe, is to find out how much the amount of butter (given in grams) would have been in millilitre and then use the same amount of oil in millilitres. Dunno whether that would have given me drastically different amounts. What I'm trying to say is: the batter and also the baked cookes were quite greasy. But still super delicious. But you may wanna dial down a notch the amount of coconut oil.

The original recipe can be found here (I just did a Google image search for "chocolate cookie" and decided that those looked the most like the knusperreich cookies I was trying to recreate.). I decided to maximise the recipe based on the amount of chocolate I had in hand, which left me with the somewhat awkward factor 1.28 - I multiplied the ingredients by that.

Here are the amounts I used:

Ingredients:

2 eggs (I had to add a second egg because the dough was too crumbly)

160 g light brown sugar

160 g coconut oil (you may wanna start out with much less. Try 100 g maybe? You can always add more later)

160 g dark chocolate

1 package of vanilla sugar (= 8 g)

190 g flour, sifted (I added another two tablespoons later on cos the dough was too greasy. You could add even more)

2. Melt the dark chocolate in a bains marie (water in a cooking pan, bring to the boil, have the chocolate in a bowl sitting on the pot so that the steam makes the bowl hot enough for the chocolate to melt). Once melted, add it to the "soup" waiting in oyur mixer. It will get even soupier.

3. Add the dry ingredients... the texture of the dough will improve drastically. Now it may even be called 'dough'. Well... except... it turned out to be super greasy and yet really crumbly at the same time.

4. Add the chocolate chips.

Doesn't really help with the greasy crumbliness...

I added a second egg, to help bind the dough and I also added a bit more flour and dessicated coconut to a) soak up the greasiness and b) enhance the coconut falvour, since coconut oil somehow doesn't taste of coconut at all.

I didn't add enough flour and dessicated coconut... the dough was still cumby greasy and the cookies did not taste of coconut.

5. Shape small balls, place them on a baking sheet, squish them lightly (they will spread on their own) and put them in the oven at 170C/325F for 20 minutes.

pre-baking

When they come out of the oven, they will fall apart if you try to pick them up. That's ok. They will get firm later on - promised.

post-baking

Evaluation:

So. Where they a failure? No! Granted, they tasted (and looked) nothing like the cookies I tried to emulate and yes, they didn't taste of coconut at all... but I loved their crunchy texture and that they weren't too sweet and, boy, they were SO chocolatey! My friends also quite liked them... a lot (or so they said). Nice side-effect: they are so chocolatey that the whole house smelled distinctly of chocolate for a whole day. And everytime I opened the box I kept the cookies in, the smell was overwhelming (in a good way). And everyone who had one of my cookies had a lovely smell of chocolate about them for some time afterwards. So, how could that be a failure? Only thing: a bit less coconut oil and more dessicated coconut next time. Over and out.

*Disclaimer: I swear I did not receive any payment or cookies from this company as an exchange for advertising them - I just really liked them and I thought that people in Germany who feel similar about store bought cookies might appreciate the news that there are good ones out there.